A guest post from Tessa Smith McGovern: plus a free, live, online Q&A

This is a guest post from Tessa Smith McGovern, award-winning author, founder of eChook and teacher at Sarah Lawrence College. She founded eChook in 2010, and after creating an app of her own short stories for iPhone, iPad, and Android, Tessa realized that she had, in effect, become a publisher. eChook’s goal is to give readers around the globe unprecedented access to quality prose by providing them with transformative short stories that they can read on their phones. I have to admit an interest here: Tessa published one of my memoir stories as part of her first collection of other people’s writing: Memoir 1. You can find out more here: http://echook.com/products-page/

And if you’re interested in writing and publishing short memoirs, you might like to bookmark this free online chat: Wed, December 7th 2011 @ 3pm ET: How to Write and Publish Short Memoir, (Ed’s Note: if you aren’t able to attend on the day, don’t worry; the video of this chat will be posted in Story Studio. Sign up on top right of eChook’s home page.) She’ll answer your questions live at 3 p.m. ET at booktrib.com and discuss her three essential memoir-writing tips.

Whether you’re a seasoned writer, occasional journaler, or if you’ve never thought you could write something before, stop by, ask a question, and be entered to win lovely eChook prizes.

If the end of the world was nigh and you only had one piece of paper, torn out of a blank-paged journal, and an almost-empty pen – what would you write about?

It might seem obvious, but there are so many things we can choose to write about, it’s easy to forget that readers want to read about what really matters. What is that, for you? What is the one experience that, if you were to scribble word after word on the page, without even realizing it, you’d find you’d stopped breathing?

If nothing from your own life seems to fit the bill, imagine a character. Decide her/his age, name, hometown, personality traits, and situation. What might be the single big event that really mattered to this character?

And then describe this event – or a moment during it – as the event unfolds. Don’t describe the character’s response or how he or she felt, just record in detail what happens. Imagine your eye is a camera, and simply report what can be seen.